Significant improvements in the global telecommunication infrastructure over recent decades have produced a number of interconnected national, multinational, and regional networks able to facilitate telecommunication service between users located essentially anywhere in the world. However, the incremental nature of these improvements has produced a patchwork collection of networks supporting a variety of different communication formats. The process of repeatedly transcoding media between encoding formats as the media travels across several networks can significantly increase the amount of time required for the media to traverse the various networks between caller and recipient and can degrade the quality of communication.